table debacle of the Franco-Austrian house-of- 
cards, rather than to plunge rashly into a super- 
fluous war in Mexico. He stood in Europe 
solidly, but not stolidly, for the truth that the 
United States were really reunited, to remain a 
Republican world-power with which it would not 
be wise for any nation unjustly to interfere. In 
this, I take it, he fulfilled the highest function of 
a diplomat: not only to express in words, but 
also to embody in person and bearing, the ruling 
ideals of his country. 

His letters and sayings of about this period 
are full of pithy eloquence and homespun wit. 
For instance, he says to Napoleon's Foreign 
Minister, "It is as idle to suppose that you can 
disregard a great national feeling as that you can 
annihilate a particle of matter." To R. H. Dana 
he writes, " I hope you will do what you can to 
prevent the country getting into a false position 
about Mexico and converting a sentiment into a 
policy." To Seward : " There is a way of saying 
that you won't be bullied that amounts to bully- 
ing." Of a certain bishop : " He is one of those 
who are for all the freedoms when they serve the 
Church and against them when they don't." Of 
President Johnson beginning his conflict with 
Congress : " 1 wish he had found means to plough 
around this stump instead of running smack into 
it." Of the approach of the Austro-Prussian 
war : " Europe is going to war as people some- 
times go to the brandy-bottle to get rid of their 
own domestic troubles, and with a prospect of the 
same success." 

Still more clearly do Mr. Bigelow's natural 
sagacity and power of just estimation come out 
in his sketch of the character of his honored chief. 
Secretary Seward, and in his appreciation of Presi- 




Class_ L#__e9 ^ .1 



Book. 




pKKSKNTEn m- 



JOHIV BIGELOW 

itttmortal aMresijiejs 

DELIVERED BEFORE 

The Century Association 
MARCH 9, 1912 

iSejEJoiuttoniS 

ADOPTED DECEMBER 19, 1911 



) 26 

individual development. These he embodied 
I with a singular charm of simplicity and dignity in 

f France during our Civil War, even as Benjamin 

y Franklin had embodied them with a like charm 

K during our Revolution. The services of these 

two persons of native distinction and shrewd- 
ness, — the one in winning the alliance of France 
in our struggle for liberty; the other, in prevent- 
ing the hostility and interference of France in our 
struggle for Union, — were of a value so inestima- 
ble that it is difficult to measure between them. 
^ If Bigelow's task was easier than Franklin's by 

^ reason of the greater national resources and 

powers which supported it, at the same time it 
was more difficult by just so much as the charac- 
ter of Louis XVI was more sincere, generous and 
noble than the character of Napoleon III. It 
was a fascinating turn of fortune that Bigelow 
was able, at the close of his French residence, 
to recover for his country the manuscript of 
Franklin s Autobiography^ and to publish the 
editio princeps of the correct text of that extraor- 
dinary little book, the first American classic. 

In April, 1865, he was appointed by Lincoln 
to succeed the late W. L. Dayton as Envoy 
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to 
the Court of France, in which office President 
Johnson continued him until his resignation in 
September, 1 866. His work in connection with the 
French occupation of Mexico and the preposterous 
but none the less dangerous schemes involved 
in what he called " The Chromo Empire " of 
Maximilian, was done with a firm, delicate, and 
masterly hand. He conveyed warnings to Napo- 
leon and his rather sky-rockety ministers without 
making threats. He encouraged the government 
at Washington to wait with dignity for the inevi- 



27 

table debacle of the Franco-Austrian house-of- 
cards, rather than to plunge rashly into a super- 
fluous war in Mexico. He stood in Europe 
solidly, but not stolidly, for the truth that the 
United States were really reunited, to remain a 
Republican world-power with which it would not 
be wise for any nation unjustly to interfere. \\\ 
this, I take it, he fulfilled the highest function of 
a diplomat: not only to express in words, but 
also to embody in person and bearing, the ruling 
ideals of his country. 

His letters and sayings of about this period 
are full of pithy eloquence and homespun wit. 
For instance, he says to Napoleon's Foreign 
Minister, "It is as idle to suppose that you can 
disregard a great national feehng as that you can 
annihilate a particle of matter." To R. H. Dana 
he writes, " I hope you will do what you can to 
prevent the country getting into a false position 
about Mexico and converting a sentiment into a 
policy." To Seward : " There is a way of saying 
that you won't be bullied that amounts to bully- 
ing." Of a certain bishop: "He is one of those 
who are for all the freedoms when they serve the 
Church and against them when they don't." Of 
President Johnson beginning his conflict with 
Congress : " I wish he had found means to plough 
around this stump instead of running smack into 
it." Of the approach of the Austro-Prussian 
war : " Europe is going to war as people some- 
times go to the brandy-bottle to get rid of their 
own domestic troubles, and with a prospect of the 
same success." 

Still more clearly do Mr. Bigelow's natural 
sagacity and power of just estimation come out 
in his sketch of the character of his honored chief, 
Secretary Seward, and in his appreciation of Presi- 



\ 



JOHN BIGELOW 



K^ 




JOHN BIGELOW 



jHcmoml !atitirejSj2Jcj2J 



DELIVERED BEFORE 
THE CENTURY ASSOCIATION 

MARCH 9, 1912 



ISejsolutionjs 

ADOPTED DECEMBER 19, 1911 



NEW YORK 

PRINTED FOR THE CENTURY ASSOCIATION 
I9I2 



1^ 



El ^6)4 






"?11f 



JOHN BIGELOW 

Born November 25, 1817 Died December 19, 1911 



Elected a Member of 

The Century Association 
1868 

President 
1906-1911 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Resolutions ..... 9 

ADDRESS 

Joseph H. Choate . , , .11 

ADDRESS 

Henry van Dyke . . . • 17 

address 
Edward Cary • • • • • 33 

letter 
William Dean Howells ... ^7 



MR. BIGELOW'S services TO HIS COUNTRY 

during the years of the civil war 
George Haven Putnam ... 41 



RESOLUTIONS 

ADOPTED BY 

THE BOARD OF MANAGEMENT 

At a special meeting of the Board of Man- 
agement, held on December 19th, 191 1, to take 
action on the death of the President of I'he 
Century Association, the Honorable John 
BiGELOw, the following resolution was adopted : 

Whereas, The announcement of the death 
of our President, the Honorable John Bigelow, 
has come as grievous news to this Association, 
and 

Whereas, It is fitting that the Board of 
Management should express the sorrow felt by 
every member of The Century Association, and 
extend some assurance of sympathy to those who 
have the right to claim this sorrow as their own. 
Now, be it 

Resolved, By the Board of Management, 
assembled in special meeting for the purpose, 
that the said Board and each member thereof 
extends to the sons and daughters of Mr. Bigelow 
and to their children the assurance of profoundest 
sympathy in their bereavement. Fullness of 

9 



lO 



years and of honors were his beyond the lot 
of most men ; and our sorrow for the loss we 
share in is tempered by our common pride in 
him and our admiration for his life. 

On motion of Dr. Gould it was resolved that 
a committee of five be appointed by the Chair 
with power to arrange for the holding of a 
memorial meeting by the Century Association 
for the late President at a date to be fixed by the 
Committee. 



ADDRESS OF 
JOSEPH H. CHOATE 

PRESIDENT OF THE CENTURY ASSOCIATION 



We are assembled tonight at a special meeting 
to pay homage to the memory of a great citizen, 
a noble example of manhood and a most genial 
companion, who had been one of the most 
honored members of the Century for forty-three 
years and its President since 1906. 

Before 1 present to you the orator of the 
evening it may not be out of place for me to say 
a few words of" a somewhat personal note about 
this extraordinary man whose loss we so deeply 
deplore. 

As he lived for twenty-four years beyond the 
allotted span of life, in complete possession and 
exercise of all his mental and physical powers, 
he gained every year in personal prestige and 
influence, in breadth of view, and in the esteem 
and affection of his countrymen, and it has always 
seemed to me, that as he was certainly more 

II 



12 



famous, he was in fact a greater and stronger and 
more effective man at eighty than he had been at 
forty or fifty. He grew in mental stature by the 
exercise of his powers, and in this respect he was 
certainly unique. 

And all this was the direct result of his own 
theory of life and conduct, evolved as it were 
from his own conscience and consciousness. It 
is not because he lived so long and did so much 
that we regard him as a great example, for that is 
accidental and can happen to but few, but because 
his self-imposed manner of life led up directly to 
such a rare and glorious consummation. 

I would especially emphasize three character- 
istics which marked the man, and which were all 
ordered by his own free will : his simplicity of 
life, his contempt for money, and his unfailing 
public spirit, and in all these he was in striking 
contrast and far superior to the average man of 
his time. 

" I have always been careful," he says, "what 
went into my mouth, much more than what 
comes out of it," and by this he accounted for 
his good health and long life. Most of us, 
after forty at least, eat too much, drink too 
much and smoke too much. But all this he 
carefully avoided, and never began to dig his 
grave with his teeth, which accordingly lasted 
him into extreme old age, and I have known him 
at ninety-three excuse missing an engagement 
with a portrait painter by being detained at the 
dentist's. 

And this not only explained his good health 
and his long life, but also his being always at his 
best, always in gay and buoyant spirits, always 
ready to use all his faculties for any occasion and 
for the highest enjoyment of every good thmg. 



13 

Constant moderation in all things was his 
rule of life. " Moderation," says old Fuller, " is 
the silken string running through the pearl chain 
of all the virtues," and this maxim Mr. Bigelow 
fully believed and acted out. At his table, in his 
house, in his work and in his play it was always 
the same — enough, and not too much. In his 
modest victoria to the last, driving on the avenue 
and in the park in all weathers and at all hours 
in the throng of flashing motors and gilded 
equipages, he was in characteristic contrast to all 
about him. With all his tame, and the ever 
growing adulation which came to him, he never 
took on airs, and he thought that the world was 
not large enough for him and anybody who did. 
He was as modest as he was moderate. In 1905 
he wrote " The Useful Life a Crown to the Simple 
Life," and that exactly described his own. 

Perhaps I ought not to have said " contempt 
for money," but rather his just appreciation of 
money and of its uses, and of its true value in 
relation to life and happiness. The almighty 
dollar had no charms for him. 

"Since I was fifty I haven't done any bread- 
winning. When I was forty I began to give that 
up. Since then, I haven't let anything worry 
me." "After a man is forty," he says, " his powers 
begin to decline. A young man ought to fore- 
see that, and set aside something every day in a 
bank that he can't open. Then he can turn 
some day from earning a living and be useful." 
And in this vein he often chided me for returning 
to the Law after retiring from Diplomatic life. 
He further says: "I have complete independ- 
ence and liberty now because I did that. I have 
done work without thinking about money for 
fifty years." How could Crcesus or Morgan, 



14 

Rockefeller or Carnegie do better than that? 
And what a contrast to the average man of his 
time ! to whom money, more money and more 
money still, seems to be the one thing, the all in 
all, to which everything else must yield. He 
kept his wants down, and so a very moderate 
competence sufficed. 

And all this led to the growth and steady 
development of his public spirit, and to his ever 
growing capacity and willingness to manifest it, 
and to keep it in constant activity, and this was 
the crowning glory of his lite. 

One of the most disappointing signs of our 
times is the lack of this public spirit in the aver- 
age successful men. 1 mean educated and pro- 
fessional men. How many of them do nothing 
for the public, how little many more of them 
do! I know and appreciate the excuses — the 
intensity of our modern life, the necessities that 
engross us and all our energies, the inevitable 
fatigue of every day, and always the need of so 
much more money. But Mr. Bigelow had no 
cause for such excuses, he found no such diffi- 
culties, and if the young men of our time would 
follow his example and his precepts, at however 
great a distance, and believe that enough is as 
good as a feast, they would find their lives quite 
as pleasant as now and vastly more useful. 

He was always alive to every public question, 
and his unpaid services to his countrymen in 
studying and expounding them, were quite as 
valuable as if he had spent the last forty years of 
his life in some great office, or in making more 
money. 

I think that all three of the great characteristics 
which I have noted had much to do with the 
retention to extreme old age of his mental facul- 



15 

ties in their full vigor and virility, which was 
extremely remarkable. They kept him ever 
young and ever fresh and ever wide awake. It 
was my good fortune to have an interview with 
him on his last birthday, the 94th, on the 25th 
day of November last. 

His natural force was much abated. It was 
evident that the inevitable end was near. But 
his spirits were as high, and his mind as keen and 
clear as ever. Some casual mention was made 
of an old friend of his, Charles Eames, a noted 
scholar and linguist, who had been dead for 
forty years and more, and of whom I had heard 
much in my early days. " Why," said he, 
" Charles Eames. I boarded in the same house 
with him and his wife sixty years ago, and I was 
very fond of them," and then he went on to give 
me an analysis of the character and qualities of 
each, with as much keenness and precision, as 
if he had been writing it for the Evening Post 
half a century before, and you know there is 
nothing that calls for such clearness of thought 
and discrimination and such delicacy of touch 
and perception, as the analysis and portrayal of 
mental and moral qualities. 

His friendships were steadfast and abiding and 
were never disturbed by any differences of opinion. 
Twice I ran strongly counter to his fixed views. 
Once when in discoursing on the Supreme 
Court and its place in the Constitution, I spoke of 
its habitual freedom from participation in politics, 
and he launched and published in reply a violent 
Philippic about the conduct of two of its Judges 
in the Electoral Commission, which gave the 
Presidency to Hayes, and not to his great favorite 
Tilden, and again when I took part in breaking 
Mr. Tilden's will, the saving of which he had so 



i6 

much at heart, because it would have given three 
milHons more to the Public Library, which was so 
dear to him. But he never wavered in his friend- 
ship for all that. 

As a great example of good citizenship and 
of the conduct of life we shall always fondly 
cherish his memory, and never find a man to fill 
his place. 



ADDRESS OF 
HENRY VAN DYKE 



It may seem strange to some of you that a 
man should be willing so soon to leave the shel- 
tered quietude of a great bereavement to come 
to a meeting like this. Two reasons have brought 
me here. The first is the conviction that our 
best refuge from the selfishness of personal grief 
lies in the performance of human duties, espe- 
cially of those which, like the present, are laid 
upon us by affection and loyalty. The second is 
the knowledge that this task which you have 
confided to me carries with it the opportunity, 
nay, the just necessity, of bearing witness to those 
consoling and strengthening Christian beliefs and 
hopes which are a light in all sorrow, an inspira- 
tion in all duty, and which have burned with 
clear, steady, upward-pointing flame in the heart 
of our venerable friend, John Bigelow. 

These are the reasons which impel me to 
take up work again by making this memorial 

17 



i8 



address, in the brave comradeship of the Century. 
I speak of them because they are part and 
parcel of what must be brought out in any 
convincing portrait of the man whom we com- 
memorate. 



The long, useful, honorable career of John 
Bigelow was marked from beginning to end by a 
joyful attention to human duties. The necessary 
toils and struggles of his early manhood were 
succeeded by the voluntary cares and responsi- 
bilities of his later years. He was a human 
fountain of sanely directed energy. He loved to 
be in the thick of things. He was never willing 
to retire, like Shelley's imaginary reformers, into 
a cave. He steadfastly pursued the active life. 
But, at the same time, he was a follower of the 
contemplative life. He loved truth, and sought 
for the Heavenly Wisdom more than for hid 
treasure. Finding her, his heart was glad, and he 
took counsel with her in the night season. The 
firmness and force of his words and deeds came 
from deep springs of faith and conscience. Life 
was intensely real to him, and intensely interest- 
ing, because it meant more than the eye can see 
or the ear can hear. Guided by the Bible, and 
by Swedenborg, and by such poets as Milton and 
Wordsworth and Bryant, he learned to read the 
inward heart of things beneath their outward 
form. But the more his meditation deepened, 
the more his action was invigorated and directed 
to useful ends. 

He was in fact a common-sense mystic^ refusing 
to let life be divided, or to content himself with 
either half He belonged to the double tribe 
of Joseph, both dreamers and doers, men of the 



19 

type of Milton and Lincoln and Pasteur, who 
are better citizens on earth because they hold fast 
to their citizenship in Heaven. 

John Bigelow was born on November 25, 
1 817, at the village which is now called Maiden, 
on the shores of the Hudson River, between 
Kingston and Catskill. The love of that noble 
stream ran through his life ; beside it he built his 
country residence, " The Squirrels "; and one of 
his latest public utterances was a fervid, almost 
fiery, letter to the people, in connection with the 
Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909, urging that 
the only fine and fitting way to honor the mem- 
ory of those men would be to protect the waters 
of their river from pollution and its banks from 
desecration, that it might flow brightly and 
bravely to the sea, " ready to appease the hunger 
and thirst of millions." There was always some- 
thing concrete and practical (and sometimes a 
strong fighting touch) in the idealism of John 
Bigelow. 

The same homely, concrete quality marks the 
boyhood chapter in his " Retrospections of an 
Active Life." He makes you see his birthplace, 
the old farmhouse, lighted by tallow dips, warmed 
by huge wood-fires, with its big kitchen, its spin- 
ning-wheels and tubs of golden-rod dye, its cask 
of soft soap in the woodshed, and its cellar 
crammed with all sorts of provisions, " the very 
stomach of the house." He takes you with him 
driving the cows to pasture, and into the snake- 
haunted Eden of a certain strawberry-meadow 
(where he was duly punished for picking fruit on 
Sunday) and over the river to a dull school at 
Sharon, and back again to his native district 
school, which he says was " the only school in 
which I was conscious of having received any 



20 

thorough or conscientious instruction from my 
teachers." He gives you a glimpse of a spelling- 
match, a country circus, the disastrous conse- 
quences of his first cigar, his first attempt to 
commend himself to a little girl by wearing his 
Sunday clothes on a week-day. He shows you 
his father's big country store by the river, and 
the sloops that carried its multifarious trade, and 
the father himself, six-feet-four of rugged man- 
hood, a Bible Christian and a convinced Presby- 
terian, but withal a good provider, a careful farmer 
and shrewd trader, " not ascetical, but always 
cheerful and sensible," a very human sort of 
Puritan and good to live with. 

Such homes as this were favorable starting 
places for young Americans. They had enough 
roughness to be bracing, enough restraint to be 
sobering, enough elevation of thought and talk 
to be ennobling, and enough liberty to quicken 
the heart with the joy of living. 

Young Bigelow spent three years at a college 
in Hartford without getting any good, and fin- 
ished his course at Union College without getting 
any harm. The contact with two live professors. 
Potter and Proudfit, no doubt increased that 
interest in Ancient History and in the Classics, 
which remained through life an important factor 
in his intellectual growth. 

In his eighteenth year, he left home to study 
law; starting with a firm at Hudson, where he 
used to sweep out the office before breakfast ; and 
then going to New York, where he began making 
those friendships of the royal kind which are only 
possible to one who has himself a royal spirit. 
There was first the good fellowship of the Col- 
umn, — the Lawrences, Robertson, Daniel Sey- 
mour, Van Winkle, Charles Eames, Parke God- 



21 



win, Evarts, Alonzo Clark, and others, — whose 
silver symbol of fraternity was given by the hands 
of Bigelow, the last survivor, into the keeping of 
the Century Club in 1901. Then there were 
relations of special intimacy and influence, among 
which the first place must be given to his 
friendships with William Cullen Bryant, Charles 
O'Conor, and Samuel J. Tilden. After that, 
comes the long list of men who were brought 
into relation with him by a common interest in 
public afi^airs, — Sumner, Preston King, Seward, 
E. D. Morgan, Cobden, John Bright, William 
Hargreaves, Laboulaye, Montalembert, — it would 
be impossible to name them all. No man was 
ever richer in the fruits of human intercourse 
than John Bigelow, for in this kind he was both 
a generous giver and a grateful receiver. 

Plutarch tells us that Plato, at the close of 
his life, found cause for thankfulness in three 
things: that he was born a man, not a beast; 
that he was born a Greek, not a barbarian ; and 
that he was born a contemporary of Sophocles. 
John Bigelow was one of Plutarch's men, and 
I think he would have put his reasons for thanks- 
giving thus : " that 1 was born a man; that I was 
born an American; that I was born a con- 
temporary of Bryant." For the character and 
genius of this illustrious friend he cherished the 
most sincere reverence. He tells us that, long 
after their daily intercourse was terminated, it 
was his custom to test what he had done, or pro- 
posed to do, by asking himself: " How would 
Mr. Bryant act under similar circumstances?" 
" I rarely applied this test," he adds, " without 
receiving a clear and satisfactory answer." 

Such a talent for friendship as this is one 
of the marks of excellence, not of the Napoleonic 



11 



type, but of the human, companionable, service- 
able order. 

But let us come back to the young limb of 
the law taking his first steps in little old New 
York. Admitted to the bar in 1838, he made 
respectable, but not rapid, progress in his pro- 
fession, helping both ends to meet by a little 
teaching in a girl's school and by writing literary 
articles for the reviews and political articles for the 
newspapers. His first public appointment was as 
an inspector of the State Prison at Sing Sing, in 
which position he did good work for reform. 

In 1846 the alleged war with Mexico inaugu- 
rated the real conflict between Slavery and Free- 
dom. Mr. Bigelow took his part with that 
section of the Democracy known as the Free- 
Soil Party, of which Martin Van Buren, Silas 
Wright and Samuel J. Tilden were leaders. Mr. 
Bigelow's force as a writer increased as his 
interest in national affairs grew more intense. In 
1848 he was invited to join Mr, Bryant in the 
ownership and editing of the Evening Post^ the 
ablest organ of the Free-Soil Democracy. Mr. 
Charles O'Conor, although belonging to the 
other wing of the party, generously endorsed the 
notes which were necessary to finance the arrange- 
ment. Thus Mr. Bigelow entered upon the most 
active and strenuous period of his labours, and 
worked as a fighting editor from 1848 till 1861, 
when he sold his interest in the paper and 
resigned his chair to his friend, Mr. Parke 
Godwin. 

Of the policy of the Post during those years 
we have his own description. " The questions 
we had to discuss, happily for me, were mainly 
moral questions. We were for freedom against 
slavery, which was the piece de resistance from 



23 

year in to year out. We were the leading, if not 
the only, champion of a revenue tariff as against 
a protective tariff, in all the Northern States. 
We hunted with almost reckless audacity every 
base or selfish influence that was brought to bear 
either upon legislation or administration. Hence, 
although we always professed to be Democrats 
and to preach what we regarded as the genuine 
principles of popular sovereignty, we were never 
regarded as part of the machine, and rarely were 
even as tolerant of it as perhaps at times we 
might well have been." 

Precisely so. Not only towards "the machine" 
but towards other objects and adversaries, Mr. 
Bigelow's early and middle manner sometimes 
betrayed a lack of tolerance that bordered on 
acerbity. He was not an easy-going man, nor by 
nature soft-spoken. His disposition was sanguine; 
his temper a distinct conductor of ardent heat; 
his will strong to the point of obstinacy. Doubt- 
less the temptations of an editor's irresponsible 
power, of which he wrote so feelingly in his " Life 
of Bryant," may have led him into some of those 
errata that he deplored as inseparable from the 
conduct of frail and ignorant humanity. But all 
this only makes it the more remarkable and praise- 
worthy that his later manner should be so marked 
by consideration and urbanity, that he became to 
us the very type and model of the high courtesy 
which (by way of sad confession) we call "old- 
fashioned." A gentleman, 1 take it, is one who 
is not incapable of wrath, but capable of learning 
to control it, and who, for reasons of good-will, 
sets his intelligence to avoid equally the giving 
and the taking of offence. 

But the years preceding the Civil War were hot 
times, in which the offence abounded. Through 



24 

all that heat and turbulence and confusion, the 
Evening Post held steadily, if not always serenely, 
to its moral principles, and rendered great service 
in inspiring and guiding the independent Demo- 
crats, whose courage and self-sacrificing loyalty 
made possible the foundation of the Republican 
party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the 
preservation of the Union. 

Before leaving this part of my subject, I must 
say a word as to the kind of Democracy in which 
Mr. Bigelow believed, and to which he remained 
faithful throughout his life. He was no friend to 
absolutism in popular sovereignty any more than 
in monarchy or empire. He held that the rule 
of the people should be self-limited and self- 
directed by constitutional restraint ; that the use 
of the suffrage should be for the choice ot repre- 
sentative and executive officers, and for such 
amendment of the Constitution as becomes 
necessary from time to time; that the object of 
the Republic is to safeguard the development of 
the native energies of its citizens unfettered by 
vicious legislation ; and above all that democracies, 
while they may defend themselves by arms, can 
only propagate themselves by example. He was 
in fact a collective individualist. 

He thought, not that the Old is better than 
the New, but that the Old is necessary to the 
New, its root, and spring. Progressivism he 
disliked for its reactionary tendencies. He ex- 
pected no more from political organizations and 
combinations than was in them, knowing that 
"governments like clocks would run down as 
they were wound up." He was of the school 
of Solon, who tried "so to frame his laws as to 
make it evident to the Athenians that it would 
be more for their interest to observe them than 



^5 

to transgress them." He belonged to the party 
of the wise men in all the ages, — the party that 
knows the only sure way to better the social 
fabric is to improve the moral fibre out of which 
it must be woven. This is the central tenet of 
sane Democracy, and John Bigelow held it with 
the firmness of the Horatian hero: 

" Just urn et ten ace m propositi virum 
Non civium ardor prava jubentium 
Non voltus instantis tyranni 
Mente quatit solida.'''' 

It was during his journalistic period that three 
great good fortunes came to Mr. Bigelow; first, 
the beginning of his happy domestic life, by his 
marriage with Miss Jane Poultney in 1850; 
second, the commencement of his life as an 
author in 1852, with a volume called "Jamaica 
in I 850 ; or the Effect of Fifty Years of Freedom 
on a Slave Colony"; third, the recovery of his 
faith in the Bible, through an acquaintance in 
1853 with the works of that wondrous inter- 
preter, Emanuel Swedenborg. So, close together, 
he found the three immediate jewels of the soul: 
companionship, vocation, illumination. 

In August, I 861, President Lincoln appointed 
him to the American Consulship in Paris, with 
the idea, as explained by Secretary Seward, that 
he should give special attention to the Press in 
France, and to the formation of public opinion 
favorable to the United States. A man better 
qualified by nature and training for such a task 
could not have been discovered. 

Mr. Bigelow was a representative of the Spirit 
of America in the sense that he gave a personal 
impression of the qualities that created the Revo- 
lution and the Republic: self-reliance, fair play, 
energy, love of the common order, and desire of 



26 



individual development. These he embodied 
with a singular charm of simplicity and dignity in 
France during our Civil War, even as Benjamin 
Franklin had embodied them with a like charm 
during our Revolution. The services of these 
two persons of native distinction and shrewd- 
ness, — the one in winning the alliance of France 
in our struggle for liberty; the other, in prevent- 
ing the hostility and interference of France in our 
struggle for Union, — were of a value so inestima- 
ble that it is difficult to measure between them. 
If Bigelow's task was easier than Franklin's by 
reason of the greater national resources and 
powers which supported it, at the same time it 
was more difficult by just so much as the charac- 
ter of Louis XVI was more sincere, generous and 
noble than the character of Napoleon III. It 
was a fascinating turn of fortune that Bigelow 
was able, at the close of his French residence, 
to recover for his country the manuscript of 
Franklin's Autobiography ^ and to publish the 
editio princeps of the correct text of that extraor- 
dinary little book, the first American classic. 

[n April, 1865, he was appointed by Lincoln 
to succeed the late W. L. Dayton as Envoy 
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to 
the Court of France, in which office President 
Johnson continued him until his resignation in 
September, i 866. His work in connection with the 
French occupation of Mexico and the preposterous 
but none the less dangerous schemes involved 
in what he called " The Chromo Empire " of 
Maximilian, was done with a firm, delicate, and 
masterly hand. He conveyed warnings to Napo- 
leon and his rather sky-rockety ministers without 
making threats. He encouraged the government 
at Washington to wait with dignity for the inevi- 



27 

table debacle of the Franco-Austrian house-of- 
cards, rather than to plunge rashly into a super- 
fluous war in Mexico. He stood in Europe 
solidly, but not stolidly, for the truth that the 
United States were really reunited, to remain a 
Republican world-power with which it would not 
be wise for any nation unjustly to interfere. In 
this, I take it, he fulfilled the highest function of 
a diplomat: not only to express in words, but 
also to embody in person and bearing, the ruling 
ideals of his country. 

His letters and sayings of about this period 
are full of pithy eloquence and homespun wit. 
For instance, he says to Napoleon's Foreign 
Minister, "It is as idle to suppose that you can 
disregard a great national feeling as that you can 
annihilate a particle of matter." To R. H. Dana 
he writes, " I hope you will do what you can to 
prevent the country getting into a false position 
about Mexico and converting a sentiment into a 
policy." To Seward : " There is a way of saying 
that you won't be bullied that amounts to bully- 
ing." Of a certain bishop: "He is one of those 
who are for all the freedoms when they serve the 
Church and against them when they don't." Ot 
President Johnson beginning his conflict with 
Congress : " I wish he had found means to plough 
around this stump instead of running smack into 
it." Of the approach of the Austro-Prussian 
war : " Europe is going to war as people some- 
times go to the brandy-bottle to get rid of their 
own domestic troubles, and with a prospect of the 
same success." 

Still more clearly do Mr. Bigelow's natural 
sagacity and power of just estimation come out 
in his sketch of the character of his honored chief. 
Secretary Seward, and in his appreciation of Presi- 



28 

dent Lincoln. " The greatness of Lincoln must 
be sought for in the constituents of his moral 
nature. I do not know that history has made 
a record of the attainment of any corresponding 
eminence by any other man who so habitually, so 
constitutionally, did to others as he would have 
them do to him. He was not a learned man. 
But the spiritual side of his nature was so highly 
organized that it rendered superfluous much of 
the experience which to most men is indispensable, 
— the choicest prerogative of genius. In the 
ordinary sense of the word, Lincoln was not a 
statesman. The issues presented to the people 
at the Presidential election of i860 were, to a 
larger extent, moral questions, humanly speaking, 
than were those presented at any other Presiden- 
tial election. . . . Looking back upon the Admin- 
istration, and upon all the blunders which from a 
worldly point of view, Lincoln and his advisers 
seemed to have made, and then pausing to con- 
sider the results of that Administration, ... we 
realize that we had what above all things we most 
needed, a President who walked by faith and not 
by sight ; who did not rely upon his own com- 
pass, but followed a cloud by day and a fire by 
night, which he had learned to trust implicitly." 

After Mr. Bigelow's return to America, he 
was appointed by his friend, Governor Tilden, in 
1875, as a member of the Commission which 
broke up the crooked Canal Ring of New York. 
In the same year he was elected Secretary of 
State. With these two exceptions, his life from 
1867 to 191 1, was withdrawn from political office 
and devoted to public service. 

Mature at sixty, mellow at seventy, vigorous 
at eighty, venerable at ninety, he followed and 
finished his chosen course of usefulness, with eye 



29 

undimmed,joy unabated, and courage undismayed 
— a fine exemplar of Wordsworth's lines: 

" Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die. 
Nor leave thee, when gray hairs are nigh, 

A melancholy slave; 
But an old age serene and bright 
And lovely as a Lapland night 

Shall lead thee to the grave." 

To those of us who knew and loved him in 
his later years, he seemed a living link between 
the present and the past. But his power to join 
old times with ours lay not in his longevity, but 
in his vitality. His interest in the present days 
was no less than in the days that are gone. He 
joyfully admitted that many changes in the world 
had been for the better. 

He was not one of those old men who think 
to show their greatness by making others feel 
small, their antiquity by making others feel 
juvenile. Retired from business and politics, he 
did not live in retirement and idleness, but in'the 
open, willingly assuming such labors, burdens 
and studies as he conceived would enable him to 
employ his undiminished strength gratis for the 
benefit of his country and his city. 

Remembering this beautiful and fruitful 
period of John Bigelow's autumn, we think not 
so much of the length of his life as of its 
nobihty, and recall for him the words of that fine 
inscription in the Latin Chapel of Christ Church 
Oxford : ' 

" Non enim quae longaeva est senectus honor at a 
est, neque numero annorum multorum ; sed prudentia 
hominibus est canities, et vita immaculata est 
senilis aetas^ 

His literary works were considerable, both in 
number and importance ; and in all of them that 



30 

I have read, the substance and the style are 
marked and distinguished by the personaHty of 
the author. This is one of the indispensable 
quahties of Literature, which calls no children 
legitimate who do not resemble their father. 

Chief among his books, I would name his 
"Life of Samuel J. Tilden " ; his admirable 
monograph on William Cullen Bryant, whom he 
always regarded as " America's greatest poet ; " 
his profoundly interesting and spiritually sug- 
gestive volume on "The Mystery of Sleep;" 
and finally his three rich tomes of" Retrospections 
of an Active Life,"— a title which he emphasized 
with some particularity, and rightly, for it defined 
his purpose and revealed his character. 

There was always something definite and 
decided about John Bigelow. He knew what he 
thought, and said it. His courtesy was not of the 
nature of compromise, but of the respect due to 
others and to himself. In his opinions, his theories 
of life, even his personal tastes, he was clear and 
positive. His preferences for the teachings of 
Swedenborg, for the practice of homeopathy, for 
the doctrine of free-trade, and for temperance, 
fresh air and cheerfulness as the elements of a 
sound hygiene, were subject to polite discussion 
but not liable to change. 1 imagine that nothing 
short of an amendment to the Constitution would 
have induced him to give up his horses for an 
automobile. 

Neither his literary labours, nor his fond occu- 
pation with his country estate, " The Squirrels," 
precluded him from other activities, useful to the 
community, and especially to the great city in 
whose imperial future he was an enthusiastic be- 
liever. He went, at the request of the New York 
Chamber of Commerce to make a careful inspec- 



31 

tion of the Panama Canal. He served as an 
original Trustee of the rich Tilden Bequest, and 
promoted its consolidation with the Lexox and 
Astor Foundations and the building of the New 
York Public Library, of which he became Presi- 
dent. He was the animating and guiding spirit 
of that Committee of the Century Association 
which last year adorned the city with a noble 
statue of Bryant, the poet-citizen. From 1906 
until his death, he was the honored President of 
the Century. 

It is pleasant and profitable to bring to mind 
his rugged face, his lofty figure, his simple-stately 
ways as he moved among us, bearing the burden 
of his years not sullenly and reluctantly, but with 
a certain half-humorous, half-pathetic, wholly 
virile grace. Recall his presence as he presided 
in this library, cheerfully upholding the tradition 
of our fellowship, from which all of his contem- 
poraries and most of his earlier friends had van- 
ished. Recollect him as he appeared fifteen 
months ago, at the meeting of the American 
Academy in the New Theatre, to read his auda- 
ciously delightful paper on " A Breakfast with 
Alexander Dumas," or six months later when he 
spoke at the opening of the Public Library. Or 
best of all, remember him as he used to receive 
his friends last fall, in his sunny book room at 21 
Gramercy Park, sitting in his high-backed chair, 
reading, dreaming, or working, surrounded by 
the loving care of children and grandchildren. 
Always where he could put his hand upon them, 
a copy of the Bible and a volume of Swedenborg 
lay beside him. Always he was ready to talk 
with unfailing interest and vividness of old times 
or new times, of the progress of the city, of the 
union of the churches on the basis of their main 



32 

and real beliefs, of the improvement of the world, 
or of the mysteries of Heaven. 

The verses of his favorite Bryant were often 
in his mind, he quoted them to me again and 
again : 

«' One by one we miss the voices which we loved so well to hear. 
One by one the kindly faces in that shadow disappear. 
Yet upon the mist before us fix thine eyes with closer view ; 
See beneath its sullen skirts the rosy morning glimmers through. 
One whose feet the thorns have wounded passed that barrier and 

came back. 
With a glory on His footsteps lighting yet the dreary track. 
Boldly enter where He entered, all that seems but darkness here 
When thou once hast passed beyond it, haply shall be 

crystal-clear." 

Thus he waited, not idly but busily, not fear- 
fully but bravely, " in the confidence of a certain 
faith, in the comfort of a reasonable, religious and 
holy hope," for the coming of the great change, 
the great liberation, the great promotion from an 
active life to a redeemed immortality of service. 
So John Bigelow passed away on December 19, 
191 1 : 

'* His twelve long sunny hours 

Bright to the edge of darkness : then the calm 
Repose of twilight and a crown of stars!" 



ADDRESS OF 
EDWARD GARY 



It seems to me as I look back on some forty 
years of intercourse with the friend to whose 
memory we set apart this evening, that one of 
the most striking of his traits was his sense of 
fellowship. How active and loyal it was we had 
rich occasion to know during his long member- 
ship. Here we have a curious reminder of it in 
this pillar of silver, surmounted by its little 
classic lamp, which at all our meetings casts its 
beams in modest competition with the effulgence 
of our modern lighting. Many of us recall the 
evening, ten years ago, when it was bestowed 
upon the Century by Mr. Bigelow and Mr. 
Godwin, the surviving members of " The 
Column," the club of which it was originally the 
symbol. We recall the minute formalities of the 
deed of gift, the documents enclosed in the 
shaft, the election of all our members, present 
and future, as members of the earlier organiza- 
tion, the provision that the trophy should pass 
to the last surviving members of the Century. 
We recall the glowing words, graceful and fitting, 
as was his wont, with which President Potter 
received the gift and promised compliance with 
the conditions attached. " The Column " was 
founded in 1825, and Mr. Bigelow became a 
member of it in 1838, at the age of twenty-one. 
He was eighty-four when this ceremony took 

33 



34 

place, and he was planning to have the aims and 
associations springing from these deep-buried 
and long-nurtured roots extended as far as 
humanly was possible. How delightfully like 
him it was, how intimately in harmony with that 
keen and constant sense of fellowship of which I 
have spoken. To him the thought of the remote 
years of his youth and of the friends who had 
passed away was a living and continuous thing. 
When he spoke of it, he spoke not of a dim and 
fading picture called up for the moment by a 
special occasion, but of a vital reality. It had 
had its part in his life. He did not need to cher- 
ish it ; it had become an element in his existence, 
and he sought in simple and sincere manner to 
provide that its influence should persist. 

As an incident in the varied round of such 
an association as the Century, it well may be that 
this quaint and old-fashioned ceremony made but 
a fleeting impression upon many of us. Neces- 
sarily the number will lessen with the passing of 
the years of those who connect that ceremony 
with Mr. Bigelow and who feel its full meaning. 
But though our friend was far too shrewd not to 
foresee this, it left him quietly secure in the con- 
viction that in its due measure the influence of 
the sentiment which prompted his gift would last. 
It might work within and beneath the conscious- 
ness of his fellow members and their successors, 
but work he knew that it would, and he was 
happy in the knowledge. 

This intimate and constant sense of fellow- 
ship illustrated in the story of " The Column " 
and in his relations to the Century was a phase 
of a very broad conception of the solidarity of 
the race. This conception pervaded much of his 
writing, much of his public activity, and not a 



35 

little of his conversation. He had a very clear 
and a very steadfast realization of the unity and 
of the continuity of the race, embracing those 
who had gone and those who were to come. His 
own life and the life of his generation were to 
him integral parts of the general life which he 
conceived as going on and on. I have spoken 
of him as shrewd and he was. He had ready sym- 
pathy with the keen common sense of Franklin, 
on the saving and extending of whose curious 
reputation he spent much time and labor. But 
the realist who savored the sharp perfume of 
"Poor Richard's" benevolent materialism was 
double by an idealist and by a mystic. 

His idealism shaped his political philosophy 
and his views of current questions. The ques- 
tions that were current at various stages of his 
long life were not always, to most men, questions 
of conscience, of ethics. But the more important 
of them were always that to him'. Slavery, of 
course, was so. He hated it. Every instinct of 
his generous nature revolted at it. He was 
wont, with extraordinary skill and effectiveness, to 
expose its injustice, its wastefulness, its benumb- 
ing influence on the masters, its utter economic 
folly, its disrupting tendency in national politics. 
But though he hated slavery he did not hate the 
slave owners, and was quite free from the sectional 
feeling that grew up over the question. I think 
he lamented and abhorred slavery chiefly as a 
monstrous anomaly in our civilization. It was a 
terrible arrest of the orderly evolution of the race 
toward the realization of that complete and benefi- 
cent solidarity which was the dream, eager at once 
and steadfast, of his long life. 

The same sentiment, curiously enough, under- 
lay his fight against protection and his passionate 



36 

devotion to free trade. The protective tariff also 
was to him an anomaly in our civilization. He 
held it almost more in detestation than slavery, 
because more deceptive, less likely to be cast out. 
This point of view gave to his discussion of the 
matter — dreary as it was in most other hands — a 
singular interest and warmth. Always he was 
pleading the cause of his beloved humanity. He 
demanded commercial and industrial freedom as 
he demanded freedom of thought and speech and 
political action. He was profoundly convinced 
that only when men were in all ways free did they 
work out each his own contribution to the com- 
mon life, the common advance. 

His idealism blended with his mysticism. I 
have never known a man to whom mysticism 
was so real and reality so deeply informed with 
mystic meaning. Many of you will recall his 
little volume on sleep. It is a loosely constructed 
series of observations, reflections, suggestions, 
citations. But the thought that runs through all 
bears directly on the conception of humanity of 
which I have spoken. To Mr. Bigelow sleep 
was not a partial suspension of conscious func- 
tion ; it was a kind and form of life by itself It 
was an essential process in fitting the soul for the 
riper and rarer experiences of the endless future. 

He has passed from among us and has entered 
forever into that phase of completed life which to 
him sleep in a curious degree represented. He 
is sharing, we may well believe, that beatitude in 
which he had such simple and sublime faith : 

<* He giveth unto His beloved in sleep." 



LETTER FROM 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



12 East 58TH Street, 

March 5, 191 2 

Dear Dr. Gould : 

If I had not personally known Mr. Bigelow, 
I could hardly have consented to take part In 
his commemoration tonight, for I find myself 
more and more reduced, in my judgment of my 
contemporaries to the compass of my acquaintance 
with them. But in thinking the facts of my 
acquaintance with him over, I find them very few, 
and I am not sure that I can make them seem 
important to those justices who like to take time 
in rendering final opinion. The facts stretch 
thinly over half a century and only a little over 
half his great age; for I first met him in i860, 
when I brought him a letter from James T. Fields, 
advising him to make me literary editor of the 
Evening Post. Mr. Bigelow seems to have 
thought he would think about that, but he gave 
me a certain literary job to do, and when I 
brought back the job done in my very bad 
writing, he frankly chid me for it, and for 
beginning my article with a fancy instead of a 

37 



38 

fact. In those days I was a youth of twenty- 
three, and more apt to take chiding in dudgeon 
than now when I have had so much practice. 
Mr. Bigelow wrote me an order on the counting 
room for five dollars, and the next day printed 
my little paper, but such was my dudgeon that I 
would not cash his order, and I should never 
have cashed it if I had not been, a year later, 
going through New York to be consul at Venice 
with so very little money in my pocket that I was 
glad of any means of honestly adding to it. So 
1 swallowed my rage (rather cold by that time) 
and got my five dollars, and when I arrived in 
Paris and called upon our consul there, I was 
glad I had done so, for Mr. Bigelow had then 
become that consul, and was kindness itself to 
me. In the cordial sense of our consular fellow- 
ship he hailed me as another salad consul, and 
advised me as best he could how to reach Venice 
by land without breaking bulk for a partial sea 
voyage. 

One does not often lose an enemy so easily, 
and I never was able to get that one back again. 
I learned a little later that he was a " receiver " 
of the Swedenborgian doctrines so dear to my 
ignorance through my father's devotion to them, 
and I was both proud and glad of him for that 
reason. Swedenborgianism did not grow on every 
bush in those days, and I am not sure it does 
now. As long as he lived, I hoped sometime to 
meet him and talk our faith out with him ; but 
the chance never offered itself The only chance 
like it came one day at a luncheon where 1 eagerly 
consulted him on a point in a story which I was 
then revolving in my mind ; and concerning this 
point of civic rather than individual ethics he 
shed the clear, cool light of our great philosopher 



39 

on a situation which the anxiety of some other 
persuasions might have involved in a hectic anx- 
iety. I was charmed with the instant intelligence 
he brought to the case, and the interest he took 
in my hypothesis. I suppose this was the habit 
of his mind, of the wide-mindedness which was 
characteristic of him; the tolerance of such human 
events as are not to be retrieved by any amount 
of rernorse, and the perception of the real im- 
morality of uncovering evils which the order of 
Providence seemed to have hidden. 

For twenty years I lived in his city, always 
thinking I would go and see him, but I did not 
go; and our next and last meeting was at that 
session of the American Academy two years ago, 
when in his ninety-first year he set us sluggish 
youth an example of intellectual alertness by 
which I hope still to profit. It was then that he 
read so beautifully, so sweetly his wonderful sketch 
of his meeting with the elder Dumas in Paris, 
when that saint of romance was thinking of 
coming to America on a mission of profit and 
pleasure. Nothing could have been keener and 
closer than the study of the great burly negro 
genius, nothing subtler than the delicate and 
kindly bonhomie with which the most uncommon 
witness perceived the whole make and manner of 
the man. Much has been said of that marvellous 
performance, which was no more extraordinary 
as literature than it was oratorically; but I think 
there never can be too much said. I do not 
know just how or why, but it won my heart for 
the man, and seized me with a pang of anticipa- 
tive loss for the time when we should no longer 
have him with us. He was really incomparable, 
1 thought, for what he was doing not less than 
for what he was. Many men have lived to ninety 



40 

but few in the fullness of such powers as his. 
Shall we ever see such another? Not in my time, 
nor perhaps in yours; but his presence in that 
perfect repair, gave me fresh faith in that fine 
dream of Metchnikoff's forecasting the time when 
on earth the patriarchal longevities shall repeat 
themselves, and men of a century or two cen- 
turies shall walk among us again in the vigor of 
what we now call their prime. They will not 
molest us, they will not crowd us back, but we 
shall behold in them the kindly fatherhood, the 
gentle wisdom, the serene vision of lives filling 
themselves out to the full limit of useful, of 
beautiful existence. 

Yours sincerely, 

(Signed) W. D. HOWELLS. 



MR. BIGELOW'S SERVICES TO HIS 

COUNTRY DURING THE YEARS 

OF THE CIVIL V^AR 

By GEORGE HAVEN PUTNAM* 



No record of the career of John Bigelow 
would be complete without appreciative reference 
to the distinctive and briUiant service rendered to 
his country during the four strenuous years of the 
Civil War in which he was our national represent- 
ative in Paris, first as consul-general, later as min- 
ister. We may recall the condition of European 
opinion and of our relations with the leading 
states of Europe at the time when Bigelow took 
up his burdensome responsibilities. In England, 
the men who were responsible for the conduct of 
affairs, Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and their 
associates, had made up their minds that the 
North had no hope of success; and they were 
agreed further, that it was for the interests of 
Britain that the great Republic should come to 
an end. It is probable that the mass of public 
opinion throughout Great Britain was in sym- 
pathy with Cobden and Bright in favoring the 
cause of the North, but with the exception of 
Prince Albert and (under Albert's influence) of 



*Thi8 address was prepared to be delivered at the Memorial Meeting, but 
Mr. Putnam was unfortunately prevented from being present. 

41 



42 

Queen Victoria, no one with government respon- 
sibilities, was willing to call himself our friend. 

Not only was what is called society opposed 
to the North, but, with a rare exception, the 
scholars of the great universities had convinced 
themselves that our contest for the maintenance 
of the national existence was not only hopeless 
but that it was on the whole for the interest of 
Great Britain that it should be impossible. In 
Cambridge, Leslie Stephen stood almost alone 
among the dons in maintaining that the North 
was contending for the cause of representative 
government and of civilization. In Oxford, a 
handful of the dons, including Jowett, Freeman 
and Munro were willing to admit themselves 
friends of the North. Freeman had sympathy 
but no faith. In 1862, he published the first 
volume of his "History of Federal Government," 
a work that was never completed. The title page 
reads: "A History of Federal Government from 
the Achaian League to the Disruption of the 
American Republic." In Germany, the leaders in 
politics and in public opinion were, naturally, less 
keenly interested than in Great Britain, but they 
were certainly by no means friendly to the cause 
of the North. They had, in fact, some sympa- 
thetic interest with the idea of the establishment 
of a Western empire in Mexico with a prince of 
a German family as its ruler. Spain was sympa- 
thetic with the South. In France, the govern- 
ment of Napoleon, committed as it was to the 
Mexican expedition, was strongly in favor of the 
cause of the South. Napoleon understood from 
Jefferson Davis that when the South succeeded 
he should have a free hand in Mexico. He was 
advised, and was advised correctly, by the French 
ambassador in Washington and by American 



43 

correspondents of the French press, that the 
people of the North were definitely opposed to 
the establishment of a French empire on the 
American Continent, and that as soon as they had 
gotten through with the work of repressing the 
Rebellion they would expect to take action for 
the expulsion of the French from the Gulf of 
Mexico. 

Our representatives in London and in Paris, 
Charles Francis Adams and John Bigelow, were 
carrying on their work in what might be called 
hostile communities. The society about them was 
not only unsympathetic but almost contemptuous 
in its references to the purpose and hopes of the 
men of the North. British opinion was fairly 
expressed in the cartoons in Punch and in the 
leaders of the Times. The opinion of the Con- 
tinent was very largely shaped by the news columns 
and the leaders of the Times, and depended upon 
the Times for the news, or rather for the Times' 
misrepresentation of the news, from the United 
States. But one paper in Paris, Le Siec/e, ven- 
tured to defend the cause of the North. The 
others were either in fact sympathetic with the 
South or considered it good policy to support the 
view of the Empire. 

The task of Adams had, as compared to that 
of Bigelow, one advantage. The ministers with 
whom he came into relations were antagonistic, 
bumptious, often contemptuous, but thev were 
gentlemen. Their individual word could, as a 
rule, be accepted. The ministers of the third 
Napoleon with whom Bigelow had to do were, 
for the most part, as history has since made clear, 
a group of gamblers. They were not gentlemen. 
They were not statesmen. They were like our 
own Tammany leaders — in politics for their own 



44 

gain. Most of the men who surrounded Louis 
Napoleon had themselves taken ventures in one 
way or another in the Mexican expedition ; or 
had purchased shares in the claims against the 
Mexican treasury, the hope of collecting which 
constituted the first ground for the expedition. 

When Bigelow had his interviews with 
Drouyn de Lhuys, he knew that the minister was 
lying and the minister knew that Bigelow knew 
that he was lying, but they kept their diplomatic 
faces and Bigelow went through the form of making 
believe that he was listening to the statements of 
a trustworthy gentleman. 

Think of the loneliness of these two ministers, 
Adams and Bigelow, carrying on their work dur- 
ing these long years of war and for the first two 
years under the continued discouragement of bad 
news ! 

One speaks of a cause as being maintained by 
" the man behind the gun," These two men, on 
the furthest skirmish line of our great contest, 
were men behind the guns. It was upon their 
patience and persistent courage, their cheery 
sturdiness of faith and of action, their wisdom in 
utilizing to the utmost the means available for 
extending and strengthening the prestige of the 
Republic, that the final success of our struggle 
very largely depended. 

Mr. Adams found his hands so fully occupied 
with his various responsibilities in England that 
he had practically no time for matters on the 
Continent. Our minister in Berlin, Mr, Judd 
of Illinois, was a statesman of local fame and of 
local experience. He had no language but his 
own and no knowledge of Continental affairs. 
Mr. Marsh, our representative in Rome, was a 
capable and large-minded citizen, and he made 



45 

his influence count. Mr. Dayton, who for two 
years was Bigelow's chief in Paris, was a public- 
spirited gentleman, whose experience and whose 
knowledge of affairs were very limited. He was 
not conversant with the French language, and, for 
a series of months before his death was an invalid. 
Bigelow had a thorough mastery of French, 
and a good knowledge of men and of conditions 
throughout the Continent. He took upon him- 
self increasingly, from month to month, the 
responsibility of helping to shape European 
opinion in behalf of the North. As an example 
of the kind of work he had to do, work which 
counted not only for abstract opinion but for con- 
crete service in securing money for our bonds, I 
may mention one incident of which I happened 
to have personal knowledge. At the time the 
war broke out, I was a student in Berlin. 
The minister who preceded Mr. Judd, Governor 
Wright, of Indiana, was a good-natured Indiana 
farmer. He had no language but English (of the 
Indiana variety), and the management of the 
affairs of the embassy rested with the secretary, 
Hudson, a clever Virginian. Hudson was familiar 
with French and German, and he used his position 
to influence, through the press and in diplomatic 
circles, public opinion in favor of the contentions 
of the South. While he was still secretary, he 
wrote a pamphlet which was to be utilized to further 
the sale of the Confederate cotton bonds, and 
brought this into print in the three or four leading 
languages. The day he left ofiice, the pamphlet was 
published and came into wide distribution through- 
out Europe, mainly by means of the banking 
correspondents of the Erlanger Brothers, of 
Frankfort, who were the financial agents of the 
Confederacy. In this pamphlet, Hudson took 



46 

the ground that the Confederate bonds constituted 
the safest possible security for European investors. 
He showed that each dollar's worth of bond rested 
upon the security of cotton, which was worth a 
dollar at the time the bond was issued and which 
was continually increasing in value. " These 
bonds," said Hudson, " will be paid from the 
sales of the cotton whether the Confederacy suc- 
ceeds or not. The cotton is now the property of 
the Confederate government, or will promptly 
come into its possession. It is now on sale in 
Liverpool, or is on its way to Liverpool, or in 
readiness in New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, 
and other ports for shipment. The talk of hinder- 
ing the export of cotton by a blockade of the 
Southern coast is, of course, an absurdity. Who- 
ever heard of an effective blockade covering two 
thousand miles ?" " The Federal bonds," con- 
tinued Hudson (he was speaking of the so-called 
seven-thirties) " rest upon an absolutely insecure 
foundation of credit. They are issued in the 
name of the so-called United States, but there is 
no longer a nation bearing that name. The com- 
munity of thirty-six States is already divided. 
Eleven States have gone and these will shortly be 
joined by at least two more. It is probable that 
the remaining twenty-three or twenty-four will 
themselves break up into several communities. 
The ' promise to pay,' however, is a promise 
given in the name of a community ot thirty-four 
States. 

" If this so-called community is broken up 
(and as a matter of fact it no longer exists), no 
portion of the group has any responsibility for 
this indebtedness. The possibility of the repay- 
ment of these bonds depends entirely upon 
the prospect of the States of the North con- 



47 

quering the States of the Confederacy, and 
this Is admitted to be an impossibility." It was 
a specious argument, and one that counted with 
thousands of hapless investors throughout Europe, 
in Germany, in France and in England, who 
threw away their money on the so-called absolute 
security of the Confederate cotton bonds. This 
pamphlet was, as said, promptly circulated through- 
out France, and was made much of by the Imperial 
press. 

As a result of these representations, the Con- 
federate cotton bonds were, during the first year 
of the war, quoted at a higher rate than the U. S. 
seven thirties. 

Bigelow had promptly brought into print a 
reply as effective as it was possible to put into 
shape in Paris. He was able later, however, to 
distribute a more complete and comprehensive 
statement. In common with other Americans in 
Berlin, I had found myself very indignant with the 
attitude of Hudson, and my indignation was 
increased when I secured on the day of publica- 
tion a copy of this pamphlet. I sent it at once 
to my father in New York with a summary of its 
purpose and its arguments. He recognized the 
importance of having such an attack promptly 
and effectively replied to. He secured the serv- 
ice of David A. Wells to prepare an answer that 
was printed under the title of " Our Burden 
and our Strength." This pamphlet of Wells' 
constituted the first issue in a series of mono- 
graphs brought into print by the Loyal Publica- 
tion Society, a society which was instituted for 
the purpose of furthering sound public opinion 
on both sides of the Atlantic. I understand that 
the suggestion of the necessity for the work of 
such a society came from this pamphlet of Hud- 



48 

son. The Wells pamphlet was printed in all 
European languages, and Bigelow gave attention 
to making a wide distribution of copies through 
American consuls and other correspondents. 

He busied himself, in fact, continually with the 
matter of furthering sound information on Ameri- 
can affairs and of building up an opinion on the 
continent in behalf of the cause of the North. 
It was due to Bigelow's suggestion that the Swiss 
scholar, Count de Gasparin, wrote that eloquent 
appeal in behalf of the cause of the North, 
entitled: "Un Grand Peuple qui se leve," and 
much of the information presented in Gasparin's 
argument was furnished by Bigelow, 

It was to Bigelow that another friend of the 
North, Laboulaye^ came for information and 
suggestion, and Laboulaye's pen was utilized for 
newspaper articles and pamphlets which were cir- 
culated wherever the French language was spoken. 
Bigelow employed also German literary workers 
whom he got hold of in Paris, as correspondents 
for papers in Germany and in Austria, and their 
pens were used to correct the misleading state- 
ments issued from week to week from the office 
of the Erlangers in Frankfort. 

At the time of the capture of the Trent in 
November, 1861, the risk of the recognition of 
the Confederacy by France and by England was, 
as we all know, imminent. Napoleon had been 
for months pressing for such recognition. It was 
important for his schemes that he should act in 
harmony with England. The affair of the Trent 
seemed certain to give the opportunity. Palmer- 
ston was in close correspondence with Napoleon 
and was in substantial accord with his views. 
Delane, editor of the Times, himself a large sub- 
scriber to the Confederate cotton loan, was also 



49 

in close personal relations with the emperor, with 
Morny and with Persigny. He was using the 
enormous power of the Times to influence opinion 
not only in Great Britain but on the Continent. 
Some twenty years after the war, I met as a fellow 
traveller a son of the first Confederate commis- 
sioner to London, Judge Mann of Georgia, who 
was superseded later by Mason. The younger 
Mann whom his father had used as secretary in 
the London office, told me that Palmerston made 
a practice of coming from night to night to the 
office to consult with the commissioner as to the 
fortunes of the Confederacy. On the evening of 
the day on which the capture of the Trent was 
announced, Palmerston came to Judge Mann's 
office and the father was so much excited with 
the importance of the news that the son was not, 
as had usually been the case, sent out of the 
room. He told me that Palmerston and his 
father stood before a map of the States (they no 
longer referred to it as the United States) through 
the long evening and that their talk turned upon 
the best method of utilizing the French and 
English fleets for the control of the North. New 
York was to be captured and Washington to be 
approached by British vessels from the Chesa- 
peake so that it could be easily taken possession 
of by the army of General Johnson. The terms 
of peace and of separation were to be dictated at 
Washington by the representatives of France, 
England and the Confederacy. Palmerston spoke 
with full confidence of Napoleon's desires and 
intentions in the matter, a confidence which is 
confirmed by the correspondence of Napoleon 
that has since come into print. 

Up to 1862, the service of Bigelow, while 
arduous, has been of a general character. He 



50 

was working to shape the continental opinion 
and to help the bankers who were trying to 
place the seven-thirty loan. We may bear in 
mind that this loan secured no subscriptions in 
France, but a small amount in Germany, and 
practically none in England. The great centre 
of operations was in Amsterdam. Smaller 
amounts, but large in proportion to the resources 
of the countries, were taken in Norway, Sweden 
and Denmark. The little Republic of Holland 
for a second time within a hundred years, came 
to the help of the great Republic of the West. 
Bigelow, in corresponding with the bankers of 
Holland in 1861, recalled undoubtedly the simi- 
lar correspondence of his great predecessor, 
Benjamin Franklin, in 1776, which secured from 
Holland the money for the equipment of the 
army that brought about the surrender of Bur- 
goyne. Bigelow was, as we may bear in mind, 
a great admirer of Franklin and gave years of 
scholarly labor to the editing of Franklin's 
writings. In his lonely fight against the mali- 
cious influence of the Imperial court, he might 
well have looked back with some envy at the 
popularity of his predecessor in the court of 
Louis the Sixteenth. 

In 1862, began a more direct fight between 
Bigelow and the Confederate emissaries, working 
through the Imperial authorities, in regard to the 
construction of the rams for the Confederate Navy. 
The vessels built in England, the Alabama^ the 
Florida, and others were constructed in the private 
shipyards of Laird and his associates. Not a few 
of the English officials looked on favorably at the 
work being done in aid of the Confederates, and 
neglected to take the measures belonging to their 
official responsibilities to prevent the British ports 



51 

from being utilized as bases of supplies for the 
Confederate Navy, but the work itself was not 
official. In France, on the other hand, the four 
rams in regard to which the fight raged the hot- 
test, were built in the imperial shipyards, with 
government materials, and their armament came 
from the government ordnance stores. Bigelow 
worked in season and out of season to make it 
impossible for those rams to get to sea without 
an open breach between France and the United 
States. This open breach the emperor hesitated 
to bring about unless, or until, Palmerston and 
Russell and other friends of the Confederacy could 
bring the British Government into line. 

There were several periods, however, after 
the first crisis of the Trent in which the vacillating 
emperor had almost made up his mind to take 
separate action. If in July, 1863, Meade had 
been driven back at Gettysburg, so that Wash- 
ington had been isolated, or if in June, 1864, 
Early in his raid had succeeded in entering 
Washington, even though he might have held 
the city for but twenty-four hours, it is probable 
that French recognition of the Confederacy would 
at once have been declared. The rams would 
certainly have slipped out without hindrance. 
At one of these periods, when it seemed as 
if the vessels would certainly get to sea, 
Bigelow wrote to the American consul at Mar- 
seilles a letter which was intended to be stolen en 
route and which was actually stolen and brought 
into print. Bigelow points out to his corre- 
spondent the serious risk that American capital 
might be invested in the construction of swift 
vessels for privateer service and that these vessels 
would put to sea from the Gulf of Mexico bear- 
ing the flag of the Mexican Republic and letters of 



5^ 

marque from President Juarez. " I believe," says 
Bigelow, "that under the attacks of these Mexi- 
can privateers, the commerce of France might 
suffer very seriously." The threat proved suffi- 
cient. Whether or not Bigelow had heard of 
any such plans we do not know, but there was 
certainly nothing impossible in such an under- 
taking. The action of such privateers built with 
American money and carrying the Mexican flag 
would, of course, have been precisely in line with 
the action threatened by the French rams which 
had been built to fly the flag of the Confederacy. 

Bigelow's watchfulness over the French navy- 
yards accomplished its purpose. The letters that 
have come into print from the Confederate repre- 
sentatives in Paris and others are written with full 
bitterness against the malicious eflectiveness of this 
wicked Yankee. They would report to Richmond 
from week to week that they had almost secured 
the actual promise of the emperor for the departure 
of the vessels and the next week the letters would 
carry the doleful tidings that that fellow Bigelow 
had " blocked them again." It is, of course, the 
case that if the rams had gotten out and had caused 
mischief of the same character as that done by 
the Alabama and the Florida^ the North might 
easily have become embroiled with France, and 
that was the contingency for which Slidell and 
Davis were hoping. 

And so the long years went on until Gettys- 
burg and Vicksburg, after which Bigelow and 
Adams had the advantage of working with more 
satisfactory reports from home. They noted a 
prompt change of feeling on the part of the officials 
with whom they are contending. Things were 
going badly in Mexico and Drouyn de Lhuys is 
relieved. His successor is very courteous and 



53 

almost friendly to the American minister, for 
Bigelow has now, through the death of Dayton 
become minister. 

And then comes the triumphant ending of the 
war. The hopes and the confidence of the Ameri- 
can representatives in Europe, the men who have 
kept their courage stout, proved to have been well 
founded. Bigelow's great work is accomplished 
and he is finally relieved for his well earned rest 
at home. He has fought the good fight. He 
has borne, at times as it seemed almost alone, the 
burden of a great struggle. But few of the 
generals who led our armies, who directed our 
campaigns, ever had upon them any such measure 
of responsibility. No American leader of the 
day ever fulfilled more conscientiously, more 
courageously and more ably the responsibilities 
that came to him. 

John Bigelow deserves, and will receive from 
all who knew him and from all who come to 
understand the work that he did, cordial grati- 
tude and the largest possible measure of apprecia- 
tion as a sturdy, courageous and able national 
representative, a skilled diplomat, a Christian 
gentleman, and a great citizen. 



